Sun 23 Nov 2008

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Edited by Paul Hales

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Google buys shortest domain name

Hitting the G.cn spot

SEARCH outfit Google has splashed out and bought the world's shortest domain name, G.cn.

Most single letter domain names are supposed to reserved by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, however there are a few cases of this not being so. Z.com is owned by Nissan, Q.com by Qwest, and X.com is owned by PayPal.

For this reason Google could not buy g.com because IANA would not let them.

According to Valleywag, now it seems that Google has gone one letter shorter by having a look at the country names in a bid to get the letter count down. .

So far there are no indications what Google is thinking of doing with the domain name. While punters could be encouraged to putting in the letter 'g' to get Google, we would have thought that there were many within its target market who do not know where China is. Those that know it is not in the US might have problems going to the Far East to see their search box, although they do look to that direction from most of their manufactured goods. µ

Comments

Shame they couldn't get g.cc

Since .cc is the same character it would make the domain the quickest to type as well as the shortest.
posted by : Photoboy, 05 November 2007

erm...

http://www.google.cn/webhp?source=g_cn
posted by : ..., 05 November 2007

dk. is shorter

I think you'll find that http://dk./ is shorter. It used to work without the dot, but for some reason it doesn't any more
posted by : Haddock, 05 November 2007

They should have moved to Guernsey

The gg cctld allows single character domain names too. Unfortunately for google g.gg is already registered (as, I suspect, will be the other 25 possibilities).
posted by : TCB, 05 November 2007

Shortcut to shortest name

Shortest domain aren't necessaily the quickest or easiest to type.

Windows users can type in AND go to x.com in 3 key presses:

x
CNTL + ENTER
posted by : Steve, 05 November 2007

I?

Surely the length of the letter i is shorter than g? I see i.gg is 'available'
posted by : Mark, 05 November 2007

Two keys are better than one...

Technically, typing the same character twice is slower (unless you are scanning and pecking).

With fingers staggered, you should be able to type to different letters faster than the same one twice as you could press the second key at the instant the first key was released, without having to change any motion (ie transition from release (finger up) to press finger down)

Just my $0.02 :P
posted by : giz, 05 November 2007

g.gg

g.gg would be pretty kool...although if I remember rightly, ain't that the name of a pr0n distributor from germany???
posted by : DJMatus23, 05 November 2007
IThound
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